Sermon Tone Analysis

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On Palm Sunday, the Lord Jesus Christ rode into Jerusalem and was greeted by the people as their long-anticipated king.
Although they correctly acknowledged him to be the heir of the Davidic throne, they obviously did not want the kind of kingdom that he offered them.
In fact, just a few days later they demanded that Pontius Pilate, the Roman governor, sentence him to death.
They said, /We found this fellow perverting the nation, and forbidding to give tribute to Caesar, saying that he himself is Christ a King/ (Luke 23:2).
Strangely, they accused him of being exactly the kind of king that they had hoped he was.
Pilate probably did not believe that Jesus was much of a political threat, but he was at least curious enough to find out why the Jews were accusing him of making himself a king.
When he went inside the judgment hall, he asked Jesus whether he claimed to be the King of the Jews and what he had done that so angered his own people.
Jesus responded, /My kingdom is not of this world: if my kingdom were of this world, then would my servants fight, that I should not be delivered to the Jews: but now is my kingdom not from hence/ (John 18:36).
His kingdom, unlike the kingdoms of the world, is grounded in truth.
This puzzled Pilate, who knew very well that the world’s great minds have absolutely failed to come to any consensus as to what truth is.
And yet this Jew — this carpenter from Nazareth — claimed to reign over a kingdom of truth.
How insolent!
How arrogant!
The world did not and does not know truth because it willingly chooses to be ignorant of God.
I Cor.
1:21 says, The /world by wisdom knew not God/.
But Jesus Christ, who is the incarnate God and therefore truth itself, used Pontius Pilate and the Jews to demonstrate the truth of his own Word, viz., that the kingdom of God is established on nothing less than the blood of God’s dear Son, by which alone he reconciled estranged sinners unto himself.
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It Pleased God
The Lord will hold wicked men responsible for the deaths of Jesus Christ.
Judas Iscariot, being a son of perdition, betrayed him for a mere thirty pieces of silver — the price of a useless slave.
He was only able to do this only because the Pharisees and Sadducees had been trying to get rid of Jesus for some time.
Once he was arrested, the hegemony urged the Jews to seek his unlawful execution, to which Herod and Pontius Pilate gave their consent.
In the day of judgment, each of these men will have to answer for the greatest crime in human history.
But today’s text makes it crystal clear that the ultimate cause of our Savior’s ignominious death was something far greater.
It was the outworking of God’s eternal plan for the salvation of his people.
Isaiah wrote in verse 4 that he was /smitten of God/, in verse 6 that /the LORD has laid on him the iniquity of us all/, and in our text that /it pleased the LORD to bruise him/.
What we find here is, in fact, the teaching of all Scripture.
As soon as Adam sinned, God declared that the seed of the woman would bruise the head of the serpent (Gen.
3:15).
Everything in the law, the prophets and the Psalms anticipated this being fulfilled.
But the New Testament is even clearer.
Not only do we have passages that unequivocally declare that Jesus Christ is the Lamb slain before the foundation of the world (I Pet.
1:20; Rev. 13:8), but Peter’s sermons in the book of Acts constantly remind us that the crucifixion of Christ took place according to God’s decretive will.
Acts 2:23 says that Christ was /delivered by the determinate counsel and foreknowledge of God/.
Evil men committed the murder and will, therefore, be held responsible for violating God’s preceptive will, but they could not have done otherwise because God’s decree is inviolable.
They are responsible because of God’s decree, not because they had the ability to choose something else.
If God had not decreed the crucifixion, there is no way that it would ever have taken place, since nothing takes place apart from his will.
Likewise, Acts 4:27 says that Herod, Pontius Pilate, the Gentiles and the Jews did only what God’s hand and counsel had previously determined to be done.
But the one thing that is unique in Isaiah is that he says that it was not only God’s will to bruise his Son, but it was his pleasure to do so.
Although this makes it sound like God is rather sadistic, this is not the point at all.
The mention of bruising in verse 10 must be understood in light of the bruising mentioned in verse 5: /he was bruised for our iniquities/.
In other words, Christ was not bruised to satisfy some cruel desire on God’s part to inflict pain, but to satisfy the demands of God’s justice in regard to our sin.
The fact that God was pleased with Christ’s bruising assures us that he accepted the satisfaction.
There is no more price to pay.
Nothing more needs to be done.
Jesus paid every last cent, and God accepted the payment for your sin, for my sin, and for the sin of everyone who comes to him in faith and repentance.
This also demonstrates the greatness of the Father’s love for you.
He gave his only begotten Son to endure the suffering and death that you deserve.
If you really believe this, your entire life will show it to be so, and you will praise God for it every single day!
Our text says explicitly that God was pleased to bruise Christ.
Implicit in this is the fact that Christ was also pleased to bear that bruising.
The Father willed to send him to the cross, but he willed just as much to go there for you.
Jesus frequently said that he came not to do his own will, but the will of the one who sent him.
This does not mean that his will was at variance with the Father’s, which it would be blasphemous to suppose, but that he fully embraced the Father’s will and made it his own.
By submitting to the Father’s will and bearing the penalty of God’s law in your behalf, he demonstrated his great love for you.
Now, you have a double reason to praise him every day for the greatness of your salvation!
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Christ’s Bruising for Our Sin
In the first preaching of the gospel in Genesis 3:15, we read that the serpent would bruise the Messiah.
However, the bruises that the serpent would inflict would be relatively minor: he would bruise only the heel of the Messiah’s foot.
This is all that he could do, and it was all that he did.
Three days after Jesus died from his heel-bruising, he rose again from the dead by his own power.
But Isaiah wrote something quite different.
He said that God, not the serpent, would bruise the Messiah.
This is not a major issue, since both are true.
The Bible clearly teaches that God usually works through secondary causes to bring his will to pass.
We’ve already seen, for example, that God used Judas and Pontius Pilate to carry out the unjust execution of Christ.
Here we learn that God bruised his Son through the evil and murderous acts of the Prince of Darkness.
Both God and the devil bruised Christ, though in vastly different ways.
The devil bruised Christ with the vain hope of defeating God, but God sent his Son to the cross in order to bear the sins of his people, which delivered the deathblow to the devil and his kingdom.
But what is even more interesting is the fact that Isaiah used a different word for /bruise/ than we have in Genesis.
The word in Genesis (תְּשׁוּפֶנּוּ) means to bruise, but the word in Isaiah (דַּכְּאוֹ) means to crush.
The point here is that God’s hand was against his own Son even more than the devil’s.
One of our cherished hymns captures the correct idea what it says, “But the deepest stroke that pierced him Was the stroke that Justice gave.”
And why was this, except that God poured out the fullness of his wrath and vengeance on his Son in order to spare us from the punishment that we most justly deserve?
The apostle Paul expressed the same thought in numerous places.
To the Galatians he wrote, /Christ hath redeemed us from the curse of the law, being made a curse for us/ (Gal.
3:13).
He wrote to the Corinthians in a similar vein: /For he hath made him to be sin for us, who knew no sin; that we might be made the righteousness of God in him/ (II Cor.
5:21).
In our text, we cannot escape the thought that Christ was bruised to satisfy for our sin.
Look how often the notion of substitution appears throughout this chapter, especially in verses 4 through 6. Verse 10 says that God made /his soul an offering for sin/.
Verse 11 adds that God would be satisfied with the travail of his soul, i.e., God the Father would accept his sacrifice.
The Messiah would justify many because /he shall bear their iniquities/.
According to Isaiah, God not only bruised Christ but also put him to grief.
The word translated /grief/ (הֶחֱלִי) literally means to make sick.
Although it can refer to a physical sickness, in the immediate context the idea is a sickness of soul, i.e., the rejection and loneliness that comes as a result of one’s sin, or in this case the imputation of our sin to Christ.
Verse 3 describes the extent of Christ’s grief when it says, /He is despised and rejected of men; a man of sorrows, and acquainted with grief: and we hid as it were our faces from him; he was despised, and we esteemed him not/.
And the first part of verse 4 makes it clear that, just as he suffered unimaginable physical violence in order to bear our sin, so he also endured an excruciating affliction of soul for us.
It was not his own griefs that he bore; rather, /he hath borne our griefs, and carried our sorrows/.
Our catechism, in explaining the phrase “he descended into hell,” says that it was necessary for Christ to suffer “inexpressible anguish, pains and terrors … in His soul on the cross and before” in order to redeem every one of us “from the anguish and torment of hell” (Heid.
44).
For Christ to redeem the whole man, he had to bear the penalty for our sin in every aspect of his human nature.
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Three Promises
The end of verse 10 promises three things to Christ in fulfillment of his redemptive work: /he shall see his seed, he shall prolong his days, and the pleasure of the LORD shall prosper in his hand/.
The first promise to the Messiah is that he will see his seed.
Contrary to the asininity of /The Da Vinci Code/, which is based on the ridiculous notion that Jesus was married and had children, the seed promised to him is not biological of all.
According to verse 11, Christ, having suffered and died, will obtain the reward of his suffering, viz., the salvation of his people.
His children are those for whom he died.
And it is they whom he will justify.
Verse 11 is very specific about what this justification entails.
Note, first, that the one who justifies is God’s /righteous servant/.
The Messiah had to be righteous in two ways.
First, he had to be absolutely righteous in himself in order to make a satisfaction for our sins, for he would have been disqualified from serving as our priest and sacrifice if he had had any sins of his own.
But he also had to be perfectly righteous in order to impute his righteousness to his people.
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